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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

BBC World Service introduces new schedule with reduced shortwave transmissions

BBC World Service English global schedule will be simplified with
fewer regional variations from Sunday 31 March 2013 and shortwave
Arabic broadcasts will cease.

The reductions to shortwave services were announced in October 2012 as
part of the UK government's 2010 spending review. BBC World Service on
FM and online and on television will not be affected and no language
services are closing.

Shortwave and medium wave transmissions in English will be reduced to
a minimum of 6 hours in total each day. This will generally be two
periods of between 2 and 4 hours each, usually at peak listening times
in the morning and evening to help minimise disruption. The changes
will have less impact in regions where World Service is increasingly
accessed via partner stations or online and in countries where FM is
widely available.

Steve Titherington, Senior Commissioning Editor for BBC World Service,
said: "We know that increasing numbers of people are accessing World
Service on FM, online, and television. For those who can't access
these platforms, we've tried to ensure that they will continue to hear
to the best the World Service has to offer at times of the day when
they are most likely to tune in."

"As part of the new schedule we will endeavour to have a mixture of
news, current affairs and a mix of programmes covering the arts,
science and human interest stories." says Titherington.

A new programme, The Newsroom, will replace World Briefing. Outlook
will be extended to an hour-long format and offer a new approach to
covering arts, music and humanities following the closure of The
Strand. Every Friday, The 5th Floor will run in the prominent Outlook
time slot offering a review of the pick of the BBC's 27 language
services programing - in English.

The estimated loss of listeners to Global English on shortwave will be
around 1.5m listeners, equivalent to 1.3% of the total Global News
English audience on any platform.

BBC Arabic audiences are estimated to reduce by 800,000 as a result of
the closure of shortwave broadcasts.

In the Arabic speaking world, the World Service broadcasts on a
network of FM relays, a 24-hour television channel and the
bbcarabic.com website. Shortwave services to Sudan are not affected as
the shortwave service is currently the most viable method of
broadcasting to this large region.